Re: The history of audiogames
Harry Potter stand-alone games and audio: First and foremost are the wands, which are clearly audio first, with the lights included for the benefit of the sighted. These have 3 small buttons for napigating menus, a round "send" button mostly for competitive modes, 4 larger buttons (the ones with the lights) for Simon-style input, and what I will call as an internal gravitometer to determine if the wand is pointed up, down, or horizontal. The main game is basically magical Simon played against a nameless Dark Wizard, with music and round breaks with taunts, and I think I'm going to go look for mine, now. Oh, and it had a multiplayer mode where you pass the wand around and the players input longer and longer patterns until all but one make a mistake and are out. And there's a duel mode, which can send your spells to other wands via IR (so the aim is incredibly unforgiving), continue until someone fails to complete a pattern correctly. And a free mode, if you hold the send button while it's turned off.
Board games still have the issue of being largely visual and rarely tactile enough to be accessible, but staying on the theme of board games that use audio, there was this Harry Potter game consisting of 4 tiers, attached to a castle-esque base. The bottom goes around the outside, and so represents areas outside of Hogwarts (Private Dr, Gringots, Diagon Alley, King's Cross). The bottom of the castle is a tier unto itself, containing mostly the dungeon crawl from the end of Philosopher's Stone, but also the Great Hall. It's these four sections that are tactually distinctive, and have the audio buttons. Ex, the Great Hall button has the Sorting Hat shout a House name, which sends you to the corresponding room in the top tier (also, there are squares scattered about the middle which let you skip ahead if you're in the matching House). The top tier is the Houses, and the middle is classrooms, corredors, the troll encounter, etc. Fluffy's room has a trapdoor and is directly above the Devil's Snare room, which has a button which will tell you via sound whether or not Fluffy is awake. The Chess room has audio, but I'm still not sure I ever understood how it's supposed to work. (Also, the Chessboard folds up to reveal a storage compartment for all the game pieces.) And the Mirror room plays a sound that tells you if you won. And you almost always do. When we first got it, my sister was trying out all the buttons, and said there must be something wrong with that one, since it always played the magicky victory sound. Then they played the game, and the first one to reach the end pressed the button, and Voldemort laughed at his little prank. ... Because the Voldemort's Evil Laugh sound sends you back (to the start of the room, I think?) Basically, it was a board game that tried to act like a simplified video game, and in spite of the very, very few opportunities to make decisions rather than rely on chance, it felt like it succeeded at the time. (The only real decisions a player could make involved buying things from Diagon Alley, and when to use which items/combinations. You got coins from Gringots, based on which spaces you landed on, so you had random amounts of money to spend on supplies.)
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